Lorrie Moore - Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

The frogs . Years later, I would read in the paper that frogs were disappearing from the earth, that even in the most pristine of places, scientists were looking and could not find them. It was a warning, said the article. A plague of no frogs. And I thought of those walks up the beach road I’d made any number of times in the sexual evening hum of summer, how called and lovely and desired you felt, how possible , even when you weren’t at all. It was the frogs doing that. Later it seemed true, that I rarely heard frogs anymore. Once in a while a cricket would get trapped on the porch, but that was all. That was different. We would find it with a broom and sweep it off.

At the Ress, I sat outside with Mike on the patio. He’d already brought beers to the table in large waxed cups. Plus two shots of whiskey for himself.

“I know,” he said. He threw back one of the whiskeys.

“Know what ?” I asked.

“Sils told me. About the baby.” At the word “baby” he threw back the second shot. It was very dramatic.

“What baby?”

“The one you went to Vermont with. Sils told me. She told me she’d been pregnant. She told me everything.”

“There was no baby ,” I said finally.

The whiskey was doing its work. Mike leaned forward, hunched over the empty shot glasses, maudlin and drunk, unrolling the waxy rim of his beer cup with his thick fingers. “I would have taken care of it. I would have brought up that kid.” He began to blubber. I was only fifteen, and he was nineteen. But he seemed mawkish and ridiculous to me. Why had Sils told him? I’d thought the whole point had been not to tell him.

“Get off it,” I said. “Get on with things.” Get a life , I might have said, but it wasn’t an expression yet. Instead I repeated the words of my sixth-grade teacher the day she’d spied my lipstick. “You’re too young,” I said, getting it down, slowly, like a chant.

“Ha!” he cried out. But his teariness subsided a bit, and he began to smile a little awkwardly and try to flirt with me. He rubbed my head with one of his big hands like a paw. “You’ve got a lot on the ball,” he said. “Plus, you know what? My friend Arnie thinks you’re cute.” He grinned again, with this hot, funny news. “What do you think?”

I couldn’t even remember who Arnie was. “I’ve gotta get going,” I said, finishing my beer. I didn’t want to remember who Arnie was. I didn’t want to meet Arnie, or talk to him, or have him try to touch me. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. There was nothing to touch.

“You’re a good friend,” he said. “You’re Sils’s best friend. So, in a way, I’ve always considered you mine as well.”

I felt revulsed.

“Can I give you a ride home?” His speech was slurred and his grin now snaked across his face in a demented way that someone somewhere had probably told him was fetching.

It was ten miles back to Horsehearts.

“I’m calling a cab,” I said.

“Oh, the cab guy?” Mike piped up gleefully, to let me know he knew. “With your little moola ?” He held his hand in the air and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. God, had Sils told him everything ?

“Sure, sure.”

I went inside the Ress and used the phone.

“Oh, you again,” said Humphrey. “How the heck are you?”

“I’m up at the lake, corner of Beach and Quaker is how I am.”

“Need a ride?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I checked my wallet. I was running low. Perhaps I’d have to do more money at work tomorrow. Just once more, and then that would be it. Then I’d stop forever.

I went back and sat at the table across from Mike, waiting for my ride. The Ress had strung chili-pepper lights above and across the patio section of this place, but there was no one sitting out here in the buggy night but us, and the forced exuberance of the lights seemed mocking and depressing. Steppenwolf blared from the jukebox inside.

“Are you going to stay here or go back in, or what?”

“Aw. Are you concerned?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything.

“Arnie’ll probably show up later,” he said teasingly.

“Where’s Sils tonight?” I asked.

“Ha! It only took you an hour to ask. I must be having some success with you. Do you realize I never used to be able to say two words to you without you twisting around going ‘Where’s Sils?’ ”

Now I just looked past Mike out toward Beach Road. I stared out into the night, in silence, until I could see Humphrey driving slowly past in his cab, looking for me.

“Gotta go,” I said. I waved. I patted him on the hand, squeezed his shoulder. Nobody kissed cheeks then; it would have been a joke.

“Yeah, go ,” said Mike, some new blame in his voice. “Yeah, go on in your expensive little Killer Cab.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, and turned on my heels and left, trotted out toward the intersection, waving a hand to signal Humphrey, who was now turning around and driving back toward the Ress parking lot.

“Where’s your friend?” he asked when I got in.

“It’s just me tonight,” I said. At last I had a man driving me , waiting down the street just for me , though of course I had to pay him.

The next morning it was eighty degrees by seven o’clock. We were in a heat wave; all the fans my parents owned were on and swirling the thick air around our house. At seven-thirty the phone rang, and I stumbled out into the hallway to get it.

“What did you tell Mike last night?” It was Sils. Her voice was chilly but edged with hysteria.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I told him anything. What did he tell you? What did you tell him ?”

“Arnie just called. He said last night you and Mike met for drinks and afterward he was drinking and yelling loudly. He took off half-cocked and got into an accident on his motorcycle.” Here Sils began to cry in a light, shell-shocked way. “He’s in intensive care with tubes and everything. He might die.”

Mike: what a stupid jerk. “Oh, my god,” I said instead. The car and motorcycle accidents of the local Horsehearts boys were the staple of the community news and drama. Yet I had never known anyone who had been killed, or anyone who had died, not really, not well. My grandfather had died when I was three, but I couldn’t remember it.

“Is he conscious?” was all I could think of to say.

“No.” Now something caught in Sils, something realized, and she began to cry in an insistent, bleating way. “I’ve got to go see him.”

It was a three-mile walk to the county hospital. “I’ll call Humphrey,” I said. “I’ll have him meet us by the park pond at what — nine o’clock? That way we won’t have to walk in this heat. You won’t be all sweaty and gross when you see Mike.” I don’t know why I said the last part; I just threw it in.

“Berie, he’s unconscious ,” she said sternly.

“I know that ,” I said. Nothing anyone said that morning made any sense to me.

Thus began a two-week period when, every other day, either before or after Storyland, and always on our days off, in the sweltering heat, we took Humphrey’s cab to the county hospital, stayed for an hour, then phoned Humphrey again and had him come pick us up. This let my mother off the hook a bit (“I’m getting a ride to work with Sils and her brother,” I’d call from the front door), but it took money. So I managed to acquire a little extra at my register.

After two days Mike had returned to consciousness, “or his version of it,” I said to Sils, and in her relief she actually laughed; by the second week he was giving Sils come-hither looks, saying things like “Gedover ’ere, you,” wanting her to snuggle next to him amid the tubes.